“Why, what’s this?” Grandma asked, laying down her knitting and examining the bruise. “Wait till I get the arnica, and then you can tell me all about it.”
And while she bathed Bobby’s swollen forehead with the arnica, Bobby told her how another boy had dared him to hang by his toes from the scaffolding of a half-finished house and how his feet had slipped and he had had a fall.
“He said I was afraid to try,” said Bobby, “but I showed him!”
“And you got hurt into the bargain,” remarked Grandma, taking up her knitting again. “Don’t you know, my dear, that it is sometimes braver to take a dare than not? There is a time to say ‘no,’ and the boy or girl who doesn’t know when to say ‘no’ is often foolhardy rather than brave. I didn’t always know that, though, and I’ll tell you how I learned it. When I was little I played so much with brother Charlie that in many ways I was like a boy. One of Charlie’s codes was that he would never take a dare, and so of course it became my code, too.
“One Friday night Betty Bard came home from school with me to stay until Saturday afternoon. It was in the fall, and the nuts were ripe. On the meathouse floor, spread out to dry, were chestnuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, hickory nuts, and butternuts. Betty’s grandfather was our preacher. There were no nuts of any kind on the ground belonging to the parsonage, so we had been giving Betty some of our nuts. She had already gotten hickory nuts and chestnuts, and this evening we had gathered a bag of walnuts and we were out in the wood lot shelling them.
“We each had a flat stone to lay the nut on and another stone to hit it with. We wore old leather gloves to protect our hands, for the walnut juice makes an ugly brown stain. We would lay a nut on the flat stone, hit it hard with the other stone, and the green outer covering or shell would come off easily, leaving the walnut, which would then have to be dried.
“Not far from us Charlie sat cracking walnuts, left over from the year before, for the chickens. He would crack a nut and throw it to the chickens and they would pick the meat out with their beaks. Mother said walnut meats were good for the chickens and made the hens lay, and we often had to crack walnuts for the chickens. But this evening Charlie did not want to do it. He wanted to go on the hill to look at some traps he had set for rabbits, and he offered to give me his new slate pencil if I would crack the walnuts. Any other time I should have jumped at the chance of getting a new slate pencil so easily. But this evening, I wanted to help Betty shell her nuts so we would have time the next day to play and go down to the persimmon tree.
“‘Very well,’ declared Charlie. He said that if I wouldn’t help him, he wouldn’t go with us to the persimmon tree. And without him to shake the tree, how would we get the persimmons? We had an especially fine persimmon tree that my great-grandfather had planted, and Betty and I wanted to get the fruit that was in the top branches. Charlie had promised to climb the tree for us, but now he said he wouldn’t do it unless I would finish cracking the walnuts.
“‘All right, you needn’t,’ I replied. ‘We don’t want you. I’ll climb the tree myself. But really I did not think for a moment I would do any such thing, for, of all the trees around, grandfather’s persimmon, as we called it, was the hardest to climb.